Chaos is Freedom

Don’t Go To Work in a Bad Mood

This sounds easy enough to avoid, but we all go to work after staying up too late, or partying to hard, or having a child that was sick or cranky through the night, or we let the supreme court nomination allegations bother us. There are times, you are going to show up at your business and you will be in a bad mood. I have THE perfect example today, why you should not go to work angry.

A little background about where I work. My business is a small convenience store, we make about $1,000,000 a year. We receive about 400 to 500 cases of product a week and we have a team of 5 people to do all this. The store is also located in a village of less than 200 people, it’s tiny. There is us, a gas station and a liquor store; no restaurants, no theaters, not even a bar.

This particular delivery I’ll be talking about was delivering about 350 cases and was scheduled to arrive at 6 pm. This wasn’t anything unusual, however he arrived closer to 7 pm. When he did arrive, I greeted him with a hand shake, and he greeted me with a, “Let’s get this f**king over with”. Our unload process takes about an hour, so me and one of my guys gets started. I hear the driver talking to someone on his phone, complaining about how its too late to be sent out here, and we are taking to long, he was pacing back and forth the entire time, basically just being a little bitch about his job. I noticed he was in and out of his truck a lot while we were unloading, until… He locked himself out. I’m sure the entire village heard him screaming and swearing when he realized this. So he tried to call his maintenance department for his company, I can hear him give a bunch of information about his truck, then he waits… and waits. At this point, we are already done unloading. I hear him thank whoever he was on the phone with hangs up, then curses them out. I ask him what’s whats going on, he explains that they can’t send anyone out here this late to unlock his truck, he will have to wait until the morning. I offered to give him a ride up to the closest hotel, which is about 30 miles away, he declines, and we parted ways. His truck was still in my parking lot when we opened the next morning.

So let’s break this down a little. In his rage and complaining, he failed to notice he left his keys in his truck, which put him in a situation where he was stranded until the morning, a few hundred miles away from home (most of these drivers come from Indiana). He must’ve slept in the trailer of the truck, which the temperature got into the low 50’s here. I was talking to him when they arrived to unlock his truck, and it cost him nearly $200.

Now, am I 100% sure his bad mood caused all this? No, but I doubt it helped in anyway.